Unmanned aircraft are expected to carry cargo across regions, operate offshore in demanding weather, and share the airspace with crewed traffic.
What stands in the way is how safe automated flight can be designed, and how that safety can be demonstrated to those who grant permission to fly. This is the working ground of the DLR Institute of Flight Systems' Unmanned Aircraft Department.
The department focuses on designing and implementing safe operations for various unmanned aircraft, including multicopters, helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft and gyrocopters. Safe autonomy, counter-UAS technologies, all-weather operations and unmanned transportation are methodological and technological focal points of the research.
The department addresses these topics by considering assurance and certification, for instance by contributing to certification methods based on operational risks.
Its own fleet of research platforms and the National Test Centre for Unmanned Aircraft Systems allow new methods to reach flight test within short cycles.
The seminar presents current research with an emphasis on the modelling and control of unmanned aircraft. Examples from unmanned cargo operations, including offshore applications, show what these methods make possible in flight, while counter-UAS methods are investigated and tested in an application-oriented context.
Speaker:
Johann Dauer received his Diploma (MSc) in Electrical engineering from the Technical University of Dresden, Germany. Since 2008, Johann Dauer has been researching unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) at the Institute of Flight Systems of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). During this time, he received his ph.D. at the Technical University of Braunschweig. He currently leads a department of around 30 researchers. On-board autonomy, particularly automatic control and software design, as well as the use of artificial intelligence in the context of increasing levels of automation, are special research interests of Johann's. He is fascinated by the possibilities offered by new technologies in unmanned aviation. He is passionate about translating challenging theory into practical applications and seizes every opportunity to do so during flight experiments and research operations.
